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Lower House gets more women
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Yuriko Koike
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The newly elected Lower House will feature younger faces and more women occupying its 480 seats than after the 2003 election, with a record 43 women, whose backgrounds range from homemakers to professors.
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Yukari Sato
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The average age of the new lawmakers is 52.3. By party, lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan were the youngest on average at 48, compared with averages in the 50s for the governing Liberal-Democratic Party, its ally New Komeito, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party.
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Satsuki Katayama
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The number of new winners is 101, just one more than in the last election and leaving the proportion almost unchanged at 21 percent. New LDP candidates won 83 seats, comprising 28 percent of the party's 296 winners and 82 percent of all new lawmakers in the chamber. In contrast, only 13, or 11.5 percent, of the DPJ's winners were new, down from 58 in the previous election.
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Makiko Fujino
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The number of women elected is the highest since 1946, when 39 women won Lower House seats. Still, woman legislators comprise only 9.0 percent of the Lower House membership.
The Japan Times Weekly: Sept. 17, 2005
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